Edward Yarnold

I have recently been tasked with making some changes to the central ‘library’ of code that an E-Commerce platform is based on.  Essentially, the ‘models’ for this application are all in a central, shared location, and all of the ‘installations’ of the e-commerce platform have their own set of controllers and views that interact with these models.  The changes I am making involve making the deletion of products reversible; so instead of actually deleting products and associated assets, a flag is merely set in the database; is_deleted = 1.  This, at first glance, seems to be quite a simple task; alter the database tables to add the extra column in, and make a change to the central models in Model_Product::deleteProduct and any product ‘getter’ functions, eg Model_Product::getProductsByCategoryId.  However, due to the way that the platform has been developed and individual customisations to the installations of that platform have been made, things aren’t quite so simple.

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